


by our own light

by TomBowline



Category: The Terror (TV 2018)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Bathing/Washing, Body Hair, Developing Relationship, First Time, Huddling For Warmth, M/M, Outdoor Sex, POV Edward Little, Post-Canon, Pre-Canadian-Shack, Scent Kink, Switching, Unresolved Sexual Tension, Wilderness Survival, approximately half porn and half plot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-23
Updated: 2021-01-23
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:47:45
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28925313
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TomBowline/pseuds/TomBowline
Summary: Edward caught Tozer up in three rushing strides and a hand rough on his shoulder. Turn around, look at me, he wanted to shout. Don’t go.What he said instead was this, breathless and barely thinking: “I’ll go with you, then.”Early in the spring of 1849, Solomon Tozer sets out from Fort Resolution to make his solitary way southeast to the province of Canada. Edward Little follows him.
Relationships: Edward Little/Solomon Tozer
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30
Collections: Lieutenant and Sergeant Gift Exchange





	by our own light

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bluebacchus](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bluebacchus/gifts).



> My interpretation of the prompt: "Camping! Any sort of au where they go backpacking or camping. I just want them to fall in love and kiss in a tent". Also, the single longest piece of fiction I’ve ever written. It, um, got away from me? Hope it's to your taste. 
> 
> Beta by the estimablesalvage! Thank you!!
> 
> Title (loosely) from the poem ["On the Forest Floor"](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/browse?volume=163&issue=1&page=10) by David Wagoner.
> 
> Additional content warnings in end notes.

“Where are you off to?”

It was maddeningly casual, but Edward was too startled to say anything else when he saw Solomon Tozer shuffling around the perimeter of the fort with a pack upon his back and a shifty look upon his face. He - Edward - had come down from the humid crowd of the Company quarters for an early morning pipe, not having been able to sleep much at all in any case, and had been enjoying the fragile light of an early spring morning more than he thought he would ever enjoy anything again, when suddenly here was his erstwhile companion (one might say _friend;_ one might also say _cross to bear)_ creeping out like a thief in the night.

Tozer looked immediately caught, freezing in place before a backdrop of tarred and frost-tinged clapboard to regard Edward with something like guilt. It dissipated quickly, however, to be replaced by the old fallback of mulishness. “Lieutenant.” He paused. “I thought I’d better not go with the relief party, when it comes. I’ll make my own way.”

Edward’s mind spun on its thin-worn axis. A sledding party would arrive within weeks to resupply them for their journey to Hudson Bay, where a ship would be waiting to whisk them back to England. They were within striking distance of home. And Tozer wanted to - what, exactly? Go off into the wilderness all by himself? Put Edward’s hard shameful work to waste freezing himself solid under a snowbank? 

“What on earth for?”

A rough clearing of Tozer’s throat, a squeezed-looking grimace. “How do you think I’ll be received, Lieutenant? The man who almost doomed us all?”

“They won’t punish you against the captain’s order. You’ll be safe, I’ll— You’ll be safe.” Edward bit his tongue, puzzling over the thing he had almost said. He had risen to his feet, now, and he stood a pace away from Tozer, eye to eye. He hoped that nothing of that bitten-off promise had shown on his face. 

Tozer gave a hollow, scraping laugh. He still looked not quite well, still seemed ragged at the edges. He could _not_ go out alone like he was trying to, he _couldn’t_ \- something had to be done. “Maybe. Doesn’t mean I’ll be well, Lieutenant.” He grimaced, pinching his bare wind-stung cheeks into little rounds - he’d been shaving again since they’d made it here, and Edward had the wild thought that he hadn’t even the beard to protect him. “No. Better not show my face again. Better not ask anything more. Wouldn’t feel right, see? Not after what I’ve done.”

“You’re not well _now,”_ Edward protested, leaving the rest aside. “At least wait until spring. You’ll not survive out there on your own.” He choked back the end of the sentence, the emphatic, the _Sergeant._ No good bringing that up now.

Tozer closed his eyes for a long moment. He looked very tired indeed. “Perhaps that’s the idea,” he said - quiet as a breath, but the still air made it loud and clear as anything. He turned his face from Edward and began to trudge away. 

Edward had felt frozen to the ground for the past few moments, unwilling to move in the light brittle snow, stilling himself like he was working with a frightened animal. Now Tozer’s retreat had sprung him into motion, and he caught him up in three rushing strides and a hand rough on his shoulder. _Turn around, look at me,_ he wanted to shout. _Don’t go. If I can face it, so can you._

What he said instead was this, breathless and barely thinking: “I’ll go with you, then.”

•••

The first two weeks were terrible, and the next two weeks were worse. This far south it was marginally less cold, but where King William Island had been blasted blank and dry, Rupert’s Land was positively zealous in its precipitation. Even with the snowshoes they had slipped from the Company supply (the traders would get their own back, Edward reasoned, when the relief party arrived with two extra pair), each day was a treacherous slog to a sodden conclusion. Once they made camp they had plenty of snowmelt for drinking water, but it was damned tricky starting a fire to heat it - the work of clearing space for both the fire and the tent was almost more exhausting than the walk that had preceded it, and finding dry brush to light was no easy task. Further, Tozer seemed to be intent upon punishing Edward for his having followed along; he would send him off to look for firewood or game (the dried meat and pemmican from the Company would not last forever, after all) with a jerk of his chin and that blank shifting look on his face, the same one he used to get when he would tell Edward something _almost_ insubordinate in the course of one of their short conversations back on Terror, that look that said _You walked right into this one, sir._

Still, once they had their smoky little fire going and some supper warming on it, things got to be alright. It was pemmican, tonight - Edward had yet to master the lightness of foot and the sureness of shot that would allow them to feast upon rabbit or squirrel - and it was fairly vile, but it was food and it was hot. At first Tozer had treated Edward to a thick sort of silence through day and night, averting his eyes and glaring sullenly off into the woods ‘round the fire until it was time to turn in - a further statement, Edward thought, on how unwelcome his presence was in what was to have been Tozer’s permanent disappearance - but bit by bit he had softened from this denial into curling tendrils of conversation. These days they talked of this and that while they ate, wandering concentric circles around the thing that was on their minds each hour of the day, leaning close to one another by the fire to catch what was said. 

Occasionally Edward would be drawn into a story of his own youth, but he preferred to hear of Tozer’s. He had discovered towards the end of their long walk, when _keeping a weather eye on_ Tozer (for after that long wretched meeting with the captain, when he had traded his own dignity for Tozer’s life in the name of truth and fairness - it was his doing nearly as much as Tozer’s, they were but two links in a chain of cozenage - and diplomacy - hang a man like that, strong and hale and popular, and there was no telling what would come after - the man had become his to watch, his to cling to like a shadow in case of a reprisal which Edward came very quickly to understand would not come as long as Mr Hickey did not rise from the grave) had become sharing smokes and clasping shoulders and trading spoken affirmations of their mutual clinging to life, that the man was a wonderful storyteller. 

Sometimes they stayed late into the night this way, hushed voices winding through the trees, and sometimes they still spoke hardly at all. Tozer would stare into the fire then, mouth pressed tight and eyes shining with the ghost of the flame, and Edward did not have to wonder what he thought of. On those nights he would press closer in where he lay shoulder-to-shoulder and hip-to-hip with Tozer in sleeping sacks, letting the warmth bleed in and wishing it were enough to steady them both. 

Tonight, though, tonight Tozer was smiling around his mouthful of grease and swiping a thumb across his lips while he took a pause to chew. Tonight Edward was watching him indulgently, half a smile upon his own face (though he doubted it would be visible, what with the beard that had made its triumphant return in the absence of a shaving-mirror). “Go on, then,” he pushed. “What did Dimmock think of that?”

“Well.” Tozer set his head back on his shoulders, chin tipped up to the stars. Edward could see in his face the way the memory traced its way around him and lit him up from the inside like a lamp-flame. “Of course he sees all the mess - beautifully, beautifully done, by the by, Arch was a dab hand at it to begin with, shavings and nails all over the place - and he huffs and puffs and he tells Frederick - before the lad can get a word in, mind, he tells Frederick—” Tozer drew himself up and put on the growling Welsh affect of his old carpentry master. “To _get this rubbish sorted out! And when he’s done with that he can do over every single join for that day and the next besides. And—”_ Tozer thrust his jaw out and held up a threatening finger. _“He can make up the varnishes while he’s about it.”_

Edward snorted a laugh, despite himself. “Oh, well! And I suppose he made a proper hash of it again?”

Tozer cracked a smile then, teeth glinting dull in the firelight. “Aye, too right. And there was no hiding it that time. Went straight out on his ear, and nobody ever said again that Solomon Tozer couldn’t mix a varnish. Or Archibald Smythe, come to that.” He spoke this last bit quietly, as if it had just occurred to him. With a slow release of frosty breath he tipped his head back up to the night sky and said no more. 

“Were you good friends with him? Smythe?”

Edward did not know what possessed him to say it - he had never been the curious sort, certainly not to the point of rudeness, and ordinarily he would leave himself to draw his own mundane conclusions about a fellow apprentice who had featured in several of Tozer’s stories. Tozer did not turn to face Edward as he replied; Edward could see the glint of his eyes, which had been mapping out the stars, go still. “After a fashion,” he sighed. “Doesn’t matter now.”

“No,” Edward agreed, flicking his eyes down and feeling somewhat ashamed. He could not think what else to say, so he was silent until Tozer stirred and rose to douse the fire. 

“Well, Lieutenant.” It was his old refrain at the end of the night, sighed out in a creak of a sound. It ate at Edward, but he’d never found anything to say about it. Now he caught Tozer’s arm in one curled, mittened hand and looked up at his lined face in the firelight.

“You say  _ Lieutenant  _ like you’re doing a penance,” he said, trying not to sound as if he was pleading. “I won’t be something you flog yourself with, Solomon. And I won’t let you flog me with it, either.” For the first time in months, saying Tozer’s first name, he felt bold. “Besides— I think it’s safe to say I’m not a lieutenant anymore.” He kept looking into Tozer’s eyes, two portholes in the dim glow of the guttering fire. “So would you please call me Edward?”

He wasn’t sure what to expect - a fight, in the grand tradition of old, or the slow deflating that was worse by far. In the end, it was neither. Tozer shifted his arm about to grasp Edward’s forearm in his own broad hand and squeezed, bones creaking in their diminished flesh. “Suppose I will,” he said, and he was almost smiling.

•••

On another night, with bellies full of the rabbit Solomon had shot on a lucky chance, they were forced to retreat into the pitched canvas tent early to hide from the sharp northerly gale that had begun to stab at their little clearing. It was turning to proper spring, now, and the sun was out longer and longer each day; Edward was tired enough to make an early night of it, though it could not have been more than mid-afternoon, but the late light that suffused their little tent was uncanny and made the both of them keen and jumpy. It was too familiar, too full of unfriendly echoes. So they sat up side by side and talked too loudly, filled their canvas cocoon with sound, used memory to beat back memory. 

“What about the theatricals? You ever been in one of them?”

“Couldn’t avoid it, I’m afraid.” Edward smiled, a tight little grimace of embarrassment that rather tripped over itself on its way out and became a wobbly expression of real fondness. It was nice to think of, now, for all it had been mortifying in the moment. The close-packed lower deck with all his mates and all the men he knew only in passing (there were rather more of these than there were mates) pulling faces from the sawdust floor, hooting and whistling when he fumbled a line, cheering him when he came off-“stage” with a pinched little bow, all aglow with the warm light of an equatorial spring - yes, it was pleasant indeed to recall.

Solomon leaned close, dipping his chin and raising his brows. “You ever play a lass, Neddie?”

Solomon’s face had that familiar cast, the air of a joke that Edward was not so certain he was in on. Once again, Edward’s tongue sprang to life without his leave. “Oh, lord. If you must know.” Solomon’s face split into a grin, triumphant and saucy. “Only once, mind. My whiskers hadn’t quite grown in yet, but I was frightfully tall for a lady anyway.”

“Mmm.” Now Solomon had the distinct look of knowing something Edward didn’t. “Don’t deride the wonders of a tall miss, Ned. One of the most winsome lasses I’ve known could rest her chin - right—” He tapped his outgrown bramble of a forelock. “On the top of my head, like so. Wonderful woman, she was. Lovely features.” He tucked a grin into the side of his mouth as he said it, and ah, it was now abundantly clear what knowledge it was that Edward was short in - though perhaps Solomon did not imagine how literally Edward was lacking such _knowledge._

Solomon must have sensed his discomfort in some way, for he cleared his throat and stammered back to the previous subject. “Any road. Was it comical or tragical, this play of yours?”

“Hmm? Oh.” Edward wet his lips - which did practically nothing, in the present climate of chill and damp. “Comical. That was their pivotal mistake, I believe, in casting me. I might have at least made a convincing tragedy, but I was limp as an eel at farce.”

A snort from Solomon. “Oh, aye. The point of shipboard plays isn’t the fine acting, Edward. It’s running about in silks and bright colors saying funny things and getting to act how sailors don’t normally. Did they set you up in a nice dress, at least?”

Edward shook his head mournfully. “Thoroughly moth-eaten,” he sighed. “Rum stains on the petticoats. Perhaps that was my problem,” he added after a moment.

“Eh? Rum stains?”

“No, no. Normality.” 

“Still don’t follow.”

Edward shrugged. “You said the point is to act how sailors don’t normally. Change in routine always upset me.”

This, for some reason, drew a laugh from Solomon - quiet and ticking, making his broad shoulders shake. “What? What’s so amusing?”

“A sailor who’s put off by a change in routine? No wonder you spent eighteen whole months ashore before all this. Hidden away in London, afraid of all the bothersome changes that come with a new assignment, were we?”

This jabbing produced a sensation somewhat like indignation in Edward; haughty and shocked, as Solomon had often made him feel in the time before, but plucked of any real teeth. “Fifteen! Fifteen months, not a week more, truly.” He considered for a moment. “And was my time spent languishing on half-pay common knowledge aboard Terror, then?”

“You never heard it spoken of?” Solomon had not quite stopped laughing, and he gasped a bit on the end of the last word. 

“Not once! I say, really.” Edward was putting on, now, acting the affronted gentleman. “If a man’s activity while on Navy half-pay is not his own private affair, there is nothing still sacred on God’s earth.”

At this Solomon let out an honest wheeze and dissolved into louder chortling cackles; Edward followed, Solomon’s lopsided grin and rounded cheeks coaxing a soft and undignified giggling from his hand-covered mouth. They remained thus diverted for a long and stretching strand of time, entirely lost to the darkening world beyond the tent. 

At some point, however, it _had_ gotten dark, and now as Solomon opened the tent-flap to go for a piss it became clear that it was also blindingly, frighteningly cold. They sat some moments in stillness upon Solomon’s return, and Edward knew they were both remembering the long dark of the past few years. Solomon, likely, was recalling the tense freezing terror of the watches and the horror of blood on the boards; for himself, Edward was preoccupied with the burn of his nose and fingertips after making the trek to Erebus and back in a howling snowstorm for the sake of his captain’s liquor-cabinet. 

At last Solomon broke the silence. “Getting worse out there.” Beat. “The sacks’ll only do so much for us.” Beat.

“Body heat will be better,” Edward finished, to avoid the silence stretching out indefinitely. Solomon nodded, and in unison they set about the shuffling work of arranging themselves about each other.

Each night of this strange journey, each night since they had set out, Edward had lain awake and worried himself to the bone thinking of it all. He wondered, second-guessed, puzzled frantically over what the devil had made him come along - and never did he get any closer to the answer, for he would shy away from the black mass of shame each time he got too close. His mind would bounce off of it and go to its tangentials: Captain Crozier, who hadn’t looked at him the same after he’d successfully argued his case for Solomon’s pardon, who must be thinking god knew what of him now (this, particularly, made his coward’s throat close and his duty-driven heart pound to contemplate); his own rank, kept though Solomon had lost his and now only belonging to an abandoned jacket at Fort Resolution; John, who had thought Edward was brave and good, John, who was dead now. Some nights he would see the mess of John’s body, hear the snap of the noose on Hickey’s neck, feel again the panic he had felt as the fog rolled in. Some nights he would imagine he could see inside Solomon’s soul, coming out of the core of him in radiant waves of color like the silk of ladies’ dresses swirling through St James’ Park, and he could see the confirmation of what Edward thought of him - that he had been just as frightened, that he had been taken in and paid for it enough in shame and loss of honor. No matter what the night brought, sleep always had led Edward on a long and merry chase. 

Tonight, folded into the arms of this man who shared in his failure, he found his mind quiet. Where there had been clamoring biting thought there now was only the rhythm of Solomon’s breath, the heat of Solomon’s body, the press of Solomon’s core to his own fundament. Outside the wind roared and the cold wedged little claws into their shelter; inside there was a humid little cave made of two sleeping-sacks and two men lying inside it, weathering the storm. Edward fell asleep very quickly. 

By the next night the storm had let up, and the weather had returned to the tolerable chill of a far northern spring; when they retreated to the tent, Solomon spread his sleeping-sack flat beneath himself and turned away as if he cared not what should happen next. In the hazy dim of dusk Edward could discern a tension along his shoulders, an uneven tilt to his breathing. Moving as carefully as if he walked on fresh bay-ice, he slipped in beside and drew his own sack over them both. Immediately he could feel the tension release.

•••

As spring turned to summer, as the ice melted down out of the north and made its inexorable way to the carven creekbeds they passed on their slow way southeast, as they crossed from rocky sloping hills to thickly forested lowlands, they went on in this way: by day, trekking onwards, and by night, curling up cheek-to-chest and knee-to-ankle. The weather warmed, and Edward began waking in a humid sweating fugue with the scent of sweat clinging to the back of his throat; rather than move away, he cast off the fur sleeping-sack in favor of tossing his wool coat over them both, and that was that.

More troubling was the bodily effect of this closeness, the low heat that settled and spread with the fragrance in his throat and the sweating skin that burned against his own, but this he was able to conceal with judicious positioning. (Several times he was certain he had had some damning dream, something that caused him to rut mindlessly in the night, but Solomon never confronted him, so he hoped fervently that he must be mistaken.)

It was June now, as Edward reckoned it, and they had come to a lake - it was no Great Lake of legend, easily circumnavigable and clearly displaying the far bank, but it was blessedly clear and sparkling in the warming summer sun, and it inspired in them both the unique and breathless joy of living, stirring water that was like seeing an old friend. Run ragged by the trials of itinerant hunting, they had decided to stop a week or two in the hopes of building their strength back with the flesh of whichever animals would come to drink at the lake. Yesterday they had set up camp with a wild relief billowing out around them, for they would not have to break it down tomorrow or the next day and drag on across the land. Yesterday they had fallen asleep quickly and dreamlessly, with less than usual to constrict their chests.

Today, while Solomon laid traps with god knew what supplies, Edward woke late and walked the half-mile from their camp to the water to have a proper wash for the first time in months. 

“Proper,” of course, was relative - he had no soap, nor even a very clean rag. But even so, when he was bent at the lakeside and submerged up to his elbows, the flashing green chill of the lake felt like some great purifier. As he washed his hands and underarms and face in that water with its slight verdant smell and its lively chilly swirling, he felt as if all the dirt that clung to his soul - the terrible fog that had made a film across his mind, the decisions he had made in desperate cowardice, the captain’s disappointment lingering on to cling to him like the smell of smoke, the inconfrontable truth of the way his eyes and thoughts had cleaved so firm to Tozer for so long that he had let himself be twisted and prodded into something direly useful with no resistance at all - was coming away just as surely as the grime beneath his fingernails and the sweat under his arms. For a long moment he sat shivering at the lakeside, slumped like a doll on his haunches and gazing with an unfocused stare at the wild sun-flashing greenery of the summer, getting used to the thought: _To be free._

When he caught sight of his reflection in the lake’s dancing mirror surface, his beard like a great smudge of ink gripping his face, it seemed to him that if he was to begin anew he could not do it thus. Drawing out a knife and a tin of grease (originally the tin had held lanolin; now it was a miscellany of fats from whichever few animals they had caught last) from his pack, he rubbed oil and water through the tangled hair and squinted into the water’s shimmering surface to make the first pass—

“Edward!”

His hand slipped upon the blade and there was an unassuming _plunk_ as it dropped into the shallows. _Damn._

Edward turned to face Solomon, who was moving towards him at a strong-legged stride with a smile on his face to match the brilliance of the day. “You ought to know better than to surprise a man like that,” Edward called with a sheepish sort of grimace, gesturing to the small slice where his cheek pulsed low and lazy with stinging blood. 

Solomon frowned as he came face-to-face with Edward, tutted and took the side of Edward’s face in his hand to examine the damage. “Can’t mean to go shaving yourself without a proper glass. You haven’t the training nor the constitution for it, my fine-bred friend.” Here, again, was the echo of the smirking Marine Sergeant, prodding just far enough to get a nip back. Only now he had Edward’s face firm in his hand, now his breath made Edward’s whiskers stir, now he was gazing at Edward with eyes that sat so very close to his own. 

“I would have,” Edward began in a halting mumble, any number of ruffled retorts having stuck in his throat with the introduction of Solomon’s broad thumb to the skin between his beard and eye. “Would have gotten along fine if, if some great oaf of a man hadn’t come and— and startled me with his ill-mannered...hallooing.” 

The low volume at which he had started out this pronouncement only grew more pathetic as it wore on; by the end it was little more than a rasp in his throat, dying away entirely when Solomon began moving Edward’s face this way and that in his one broad hand, apparently sizing him up. For what, Edward could not say - but perhaps he should have known, for a moment later Solomon’s other hand found his own and slipped the still-dripping blade from it as delicately as a weaver at her work. “Well then,” Solomon said. “Suppose I ought to make it up to you.”

Being shaved by Solomon Tozer was rather akin to what Edward imagined his horses must have felt when he would brush them down for a ride. It was roughly executed, with the blade sometimes scraping too hard and the hand catching its calluses on Edward’s fresh-bare skin as it rubbed in grease, but at the same moment there was a dizzying quality of care to it. Edward had always hoped that his ladies knew, though the brush might scratch or bother when they were eager to get into the open and ride, that it was done out of care and love for them and for their coats; this, now, he thought, must be some small consolation, for it proved to him that such dedication could be felt. For though Solomon’s hand was not always gentle, he did rub in the grease with assiduity to avoid chapping, he did pass over each spot twice for an even shave, he did shape Edward’s whiskers into the spitting image of what they had been two years ago, crisp and neat and gentlemanly. What could describe such attention, Edward thought, if not dedication and care?

When the last of the stray prickling hairs had been swept from his face by the captivating planes of Solomon’s hand, Edward was held in place by the gaze of his erstwhile steward. They were still quite close, close enough for Edward to see the white pucker where Solomon’s face had healed over and the way his lips were not quite so chapped now. 

He opened his mouth, intending to thank him, intending perhaps to offer reciprocation. “Solomon—”

“Sol,” came the response, hasty and firm, cutting him off. “You should call me Sol.”

Edward blinked. Acquiesced, instinctively: “Alright. Sol.” It made something tendril out inside of him to say it, short and round and familiar. 

“Nobody who knows me calls me Solomon,” he went on. “Not since my Ma. And I, I thought for awhile that I liked it when you did, but—”

“Yes,” Edward nodded. Of course. Who would want to be reminded of a mother he would never see again?

“But it makes it sound like you don’t know me.” Sol’s hand was still on his face, burning in where he was newly bare. His eyes were very close on Edward’s own, brown like stones on the lakebed, sucking up the light like water and shining it back. “I’d like you to know me, Edward.”

Edward was cross-eyed for looking, open-mouthed for gasping, and then he was crushing his lips into Sol’s with starvation clumsiness and Sol was kissing him, pulling his face in with one hand and gripping his waist with the other and seeming to envelop Edward in a bold and desperate warmth. Someone was making high little noises, shaking shuddering sighs, and Edward could not tell at all which one of them it was. This was it - this was what he could never be free from. What had led him down the path to ruin, first at Terror Camp and then into the wilds of Rupert’s Land. An ugly thing sat still in his stomach, shame over what this infatuation had wrought curdling his pleasure. But in the sunlight, in the shadows of the trees, ankle-deep in a cold living lake and clinging to Sol like there were once more lives in the balance, he felt some of it slip away into the water. _To be free._

“I want to know you. Sol,” he gasped. “I want you,” a leg between two others, shin rubbing shin, hair catching, “to know me.”

They tripped up the bank together to sprawl upon the shore, cushioned by the leaf-litter and Sol’s discarded coat. Edward could taste Sol’s breath in his mouth, could smell the enveloping odor of him, and it tore him with conflicting wants: to tuck his nose into neck or underarm or groin and heave in breath until he knew the scent of Sol’s body by heart, to toss him into the lake and scrub at him with hands and tongue until he smelled clean and damp like the water that glistened before them. For the moment he did neither, only suckled at Sol’s lower lip and tangled both hands in his hair - drawing him close, close, close as if he could take Sol into himself and become one perfect thing with no faults or fears. 

Sol’s hand had found his prick, eager and sweltering in his wool uniform trousers, and at the first eclipsing clutch of skin on skin Edward gasped and hid his face in the hot cave of Sol’s neck and shoulder. Such a handling, after what must now have been more than a year of nothing at all, was enough to make him feel already cracked-open and spilling. Sol’s hand was sure upon his prick, enough for Edward to know he was no stranger to it - but some part of him had known all along, or at least had hoped wildly, since that first insubordinate smile. He had wished for this, burned with it, been tormented by it - and now he had it, here in sight of water, brash and reckless with the dizzying weight of Sol’s body against his own and the reverent stroke of Sol’s hand over his cock. In it was all the past and none of it; all of Edward’s pent-up and ruinous desire reformed clean.

There was a breeze coming off the water, sending chilly kisses over the wide expanse of skin where his trousers rode down, pricking up gooseflesh until Sol slid his free hand up over Edward’s arse to cup him rough and warm. Edward felt vaguely that he should be reciprocating, but he was finding it difficult to concentrate on anything beyond Sol’s hands - he felt like shouting, felt like tearing in half, as Sol slipped his fingers into Edward’s damp crack and stroked idly in the same moment he rubbed a thumb over the weeping head of Edward’s prick. He bucked and writhed between those two hands, one making itself a warm cave to receive Edward’s essence and the other pressing in like a prow through open water, navigating surely towards the gate of Edward’s body to _give_. The tug of skin over flesh, the frantic sliding friction, was offset perfectly by the way Sol’s finger traced and slipped and caught around his rim - not pushing in, only rubbing over and about, mapping him out, teasing what might be to come. 

Edward’s lungs were full of the scents of life: damp leaves beneath them, sun baking above, and in the midst of it all the essential smell of Sol that Edward had learned so well these past months, warm and spiced and bitter at the edges, clinging to his nose and throat. His eyes were open now, fixed on Sol, whose face was red and whose dark eyes were alight with burning focus. His skin poured sweat and his tongue felt dry, so he sated himself on Sol’s lips, sucking and kissing and tonguing in breathlessly, and Sol’s hand stroked up with precisely the right pressure at the same time as Sol’s finger caught on his rim and nudged in just the smallest fraction— 

Edward came like he was pouring something out of himself, something heavier and more wretched than seed. He shuddered and bit into Sol’s lip - Sol groaned and twitched at this, from pain or pleasure Edward could not tell - and rolled his hips like the swell of a calming sea, uneven and diminishing thrusts as he painted Sol’s hand in copious white. 

As he stroked down Sol’s body to grasp the long line of his cock where it was rubbing idly between their two bodies, Sol’s hand came up covered in seed and Edward, absentmindedly, leant over to lick it clean. Sol groaned to see Edward lapping at his fingers; thrust them deeper, smiled sly and wide when Edward knit his brow and hollowed his cheeks with dedication. “Hell, Neddie.” He sounded like he was witnessing a miracle. “Your _mouth.”_

There were any number of replies Edward could have made: smart, pithy ones, _See what a good shave can do for a man;_ and more desperate, more vulnerable, _All yours._ But in the hazy bloom of post-orgasm he found himself quite beyond words, so in place of them he squirmed down the length of Sol’s body and endeavored - sweaty hands slipping on his flies, wild eyes fixed on his face - to demonstrate the further benefits of his mouth.

Once he was facing down Sol’s cock he had to pause, however, and simply stare. He was thicker than most Edward had seen and respectably lengthy as well, blushed up red all the way from his stones - plump and golden-furred - to the wet tip of him, thick and blunt and dripping juice. Edward eagerly awaited the way it would make his throat twitch and seize as it thrust in.

Sol nudged him with one foot, frowning down at him from up on his elbows. “What’re you just starin’ at it for?” Edward loosed a frighteningly high little laugh at that, and then, to avoid saying something silly like _You’re big_ or _You’re beautiful,_ ducked down and sucked Sol’s prickhead into his mouth. 

The flavor of Sol burst on his tongue like a new and exotic fruit, immediate and overpowering and sweet despite itself. He lingered there for a long moment, toying Sol’s foreskin with his tongue and lapping around the head until Sol was groaning long and luxuriantly beneath him. He spent some time in charting out Sol’s topography, pressed sloppy kisses up and down the length of him, sucked on his stones each in turn. Traced the vein up the underside with the point of his tongue - thudding ardently, Sol’s lifeblood feeding his desire - and laved over the head again with a wide flat stroke. And oh, oh, he had forgotten how much he loved this, the weight and smell and taste of it. As he bobbed his head down slow to take Sol’s length in further he felt righted, steady, like sailing with a calm sea and a quick wind. Surely this was his calling as much as the sea ever had been - to be filled, to take a man (Sergeant Tozer, Solomon, _Sol)_ into his body and let him berth there as long as he liked. _Come and live in me,_ he thought as Sol’s cock bumped the gate of his throat once, twice, and slid through to sheathe itself in the convulsing tightness beyond. _I’ll look after you._

He set a messy rhythm over Sol’s prick, letting it slide from his throat when the suffocating sting became too much, hands grasping what his mouth could not accommodate. He let drool fall down in rivers and streams from his lips, let himself moan and grunt and choke around his mouthful, and glowed to hear the answering noises from Sol - drawn-out groans and senseless slurred praise, and a hand coming down to tangle lovingly in his hair. 

“Ned,” he was gasping now, tugging frantic but gentle at the back of his neck, “Neddie, ’m close—” Edward flicked his eyes up to look Sol in the face - flushed cheeks and knit brow and lips all bitten - as he kept his mouth precisely where it was, sucking and gulping around all the cock he could fit in it. “Oh,” Sol sighed, “oh,” and he was spending, filling Edward’s mouth with the hot libation of seed, with a great flexing of his mainmast thighs and a taut tossing-back of his head to expose his sweet thick throat.

Edward pulled back once he had got a mouthful, pumping Sol’s cock to coax the last spurts out over his lips and chin. He finished with a cleaning lick over Sol’s slit and crawled up his body to kiss him with seed flavoring his mouth and dripping down his chin. Sol opened his mouth beneath him like he was pouring in fresh clean water, drinking thoroughly of Edward’s mouth and his own essence. 

How long they laid there kissing Edward could not say. The sun was high and insistent in the sky by the time Sol peeled away from him, groaning and rubbing his laid-upon limbs. “Budge,” he chirped, nudging Edward’s flank with one bare foot. “Come on. Ought to have a proper wash after all that.”

Edward rolled over onto his back and squinted up at Sol. He felt far too drowsy to move a single inch, and told him so. 

Sol was unconvinced. “Come on! You want me to carry you there?”

“Hmm.” Edward stretched, groaned, draped himself limp across the ground like a swooning maiden. “Wouldn’t mind it.”

“Really.”

“What’s this,” Edward grinned. “Scared you won’t be able to lift me?” He kicked his legs a bit and sent his most innocent, brilliant smile up at the hazy shape of Sol’s face where it was shaded by the sun.

“I can lift your pretty arse right enough, Edward Little. You watch me.” Sure enough, the next thing Edward knew he was being bundled out of his trousers and into Sol’s straining arms. “Get your shirt off before it gets wet, love,” he tossed out casually, smacking said arse under the guise of adjusting his grip. 

Edward was too jarred to do much but gasp and throw his arms about Sol’s shoulders to try and keep his balance better. To his eternal embarrassment, he let out another terribly high and tittering laugh when Sol nearly toppled them both stumbling on a rock. Finally, he was able to gain enough purchase to squirm out of his shirt and pluck off his socks, which he sent billowing heedlessly behind the pair of them as Sol continued their ersatz march to the sea. There was a sort of giddy glee in being carried like this, like he was - not _light,_ still substantial, but worthy of being gathered up and paraded about at whim. He was surrounded by Sol’s wide hairy chest and his soft hairy belly, all dotted with little birthmarks and slick with sweat. He tucked his head into Sol’s shoulder to watch the lake approach, let himself be lost in the scent and feel of him. 

As if he could read Edward’s thoughts, Sol piped up in a musing tone, “Should’ve seen your face when you caught me going off. Looked like a proper little wife, finding out she’d been stepped out on.” He adjusted his grip again as he stepped into the water, furred forearms shifting against Edward’s exposed skin. “Now we know why, don’t we.” 

Edward could only muster a weak glare to match Sol’s obscenely pleased expression, but it didn’t matter all that much - in the next moment Sol was hip-deep in the lake and he himself was going down hard into the sparkling waters. He spit out a mouthful of vegetal-tasting water when he surfaced, flipping his hair out of his face to level a much stronger glare at the gentleman opposite him. “For shame, sir,” he volleyed back, accentuating and pitching up the high-class accent he had spent his life learning to imitate (he wasn’t too far off to begin with, but there was a bit of the North that had taken some scrubbing away in his days as a mid, and it was creeping back into his voice from the time he spent with Sol - it made him perhaps happier than it should when he would catch himself slipping into it). “Tossing your own lady-wife into a murky old lake. I say, really.”

Perhaps it was the chill of the water, perhaps the brightness of the sun, perhaps the laxity that followed such pleasant diversions, but rather than the familiar scratchy chuckle, this farce of Edward’s was met by a peal of loud, brash laughter. Sol’s face split open in a shining yellow grin and he flopped back in the water, dragging Edward down with him, bodies shaking against each other as Edward started to laugh too. When they subsided it was to find each other’s lips again, to trade indulgent kisses in the great living solitude of the lake. Edward thought, as he muffled a last hiccuping chuckle in Sol’s mouth, that he had never felt more free. 

•••

The next morning Edward was roused early, jostled awake by Sol’s attempts to extricate himself quietly from the tangle of limbs they had become in the night. Unwilling to face the morning just yet, leery of the dawntime chill that was already creeping in between the blankets, Edward shifted his weight more heavily onto Sol and tucked his face into Sol’s neck. “Don’t get up yet,” he murmured. “Stay here, c’mon.”

“Got to,” Sol grunted back. “Lots to do today, Ned.”

“Oh.” He frowned, sighed, didn’t move off of Sol. “Such as?”

Sol cleared his throat, still scratchy from sleep, and spoke up louder. “Check the traps. Get a fire on for breakfast if there’s any game. Try to go fishing - god knows what with, though. And, ah— Oh, yes. I’ve a mind to give you a proper buggering later on, if you’re keen.”

Edward choked on his yawn, feeling the knee-jerk panic response common to sailors and other society sodomites. “You— Christ, Sol.” He scrubbed a hand over his face as the adrenaline ebbed away to be replaced by relieved fondness. “It’s a damn good thing we’re alone out here.”

“Mmm. Isn’t it.” Sol’s answering grin was positively predatory. “Although. It is still Company land. Could be fur trappers about. Could be anywhere, really.” His hands wandered to Edward’s bare chest, stroking through the thick black hair there with firm flat hands. “Just waiting to capture your fine silky pelt.”

The sleepy snort that was fizzing in Edward’s nose turned to a sharp inhale as Sol’s fingers found his nipples and yanked - not cruelly, not painfully, just an assertion of dominance, as a dog’s lead might be pulled. _Heel, now._ Edward groaned low and long, arched his chest up into Sol’s grip, _Yes._

“So what do you say, Neddie?” Sol’s hands slipped lower, sparing a moment to squeeze at the meager flesh of his belly before tugging his drawers down and wrapping one hot palm around his half-stiff prick. “Can you be quiet for me? Keep us nice and safe?”

Edward bit his tongue, choked down a whine, and nodded with a confidence he did not feel as Sol began pulling him off. It felt in the same breath shocking and terribly familiar - how often had he done this to himself, woken hard and taken himself in hand with his mind full of Tozer’s pleasing form and dismaying manners? But this was not his own hand, this was Tozer himself, this was _Sol_ pressed up close against him, making him sweat and writhe first thing in the morning, shushing him in rhythmic pursed-lips sounds like you’d use to gentle down a horse whenever he whined or groaned or gasped. It was the immediacy of that knowledge, combined with its physical counterpart - the tense holding-in of sound that squeezed his chest, the callused catch and drag of Sol’s big hand that suffused all below, and now, oh, Sol’s other hand coming back up to toy with his nipples and squeeze at the flesh around, to play with his tits like they were Sol’s own property - that had him spilling in a sudden thrusting shock onto his belly, his thigh, Sol’s hand. Sol brought him through it, milked the last few drops of seed from his oversensitive head in a methodical motion - and wiped his sticky hand unrepentantly on Edward’s chest.

“Ho there,” Edward grumbled, feeling - if anything - _more_ ready to go back to sleep than he had been before this little tumble. “You’re messing my nice soft pelt. Won’t be worth anything now.”

“Good,” Sol called as he skipped out of the tent. “Don’t mind being the only one’ll have you.”

Breakfast was a slim affair - consisting mainly of pemmican and a few handfuls of sour green berries which Sol insisted would be blueberries eventually, and thus would not spell their doom by poison - as the traps had yielded nothing of note. This made fishing all the more urgent, and as the sun climbed past the treetops it found the two of them rigging up makeshift lines and rods and hooks by the lakeside. 

Sol sat whittling a cohort of sticks to haphazard points at one end and notched tops at the other, humming absentmindedly as he did so - _At the Angel Inn in Manchester, there lives the girl for me_ \- and tossing his hair out of his eyes every so often. The sun was licking the side of his face, now, lighting his hair in a riotous dance of gold and making his dark eyes blaze out to luminosity. Edward sat beside him, meant to be tying tent-ropes together for a fishing line, but spending most of his time just staring at Sol. He was allowed to stare, now, after all: allowed to watch the big hands that had wrapped around his prick not two hours ago, the lighted fuzz of hair on the bared forearms that had carried him into the water, the tongue that stuck out absently between the lips that had been so hungry against his own. He almost dreaded their return to civilization - in the towns of Canada West, remote as they may be, he doubted they would be permitted the long glances and intimate touches to which he had just begun to be accustomed.

“What do you suppose we’ll do,” he ventured, “when we reach Canada?”

Sol didn’t look up from his carving, but the corners of a smile began to round out his cheeks. “Anything we like, I suppose. Reckon I’ve still got enough skill as a carpenter to build us a suitable house out in the wilds. We could live off the land, grow our own food. Come into town once or twice a year for cloth and flour and such, keep to ourselves.” His voice took on a drifting levity as he spoke, smile cracking open wider in the sun. “Or,” he continued, pointing a newly-finished stick in Edward’s direction, “we could keep on east and take up fishing. Might be we get sick of all this land after a year or two, end up back in the sea.”

“Hmm.” Edward smiled back as he pondered on that. He missed the open sea, missed it dearly and rendingly, as one would miss one’s nursemaid, but life aboard a ship had become so entwined with horror for him - the gentle creak of the boards turned to a harsh inescapable shrieking, the comfortable cramped nature of a ship full of men shifting into something dangerous, the compasses spinning and the chronometers frozen over and the ever-present stench of wet wool - that he did not know whether he’d ever be able to set foot upon a ship again, even a sweet little fishing vessel. “Perhaps. I’m quite happy with all this dry land, just at the moment.” He looked out across the blue-green expanse of the lake, squinted against the brilliant daggers of morning sun that it threw up in his eyes. “Maybe we could find a lake to build our house by.”

“Ah, that’d be lovely.” Sol beckoned, and Edward held out his two improvised lines; Sol fastened hooks (for which the top inch of the grease-tin had been sacrificed) and bits of bait (last week’s rabbit-meat, kept in small quantities for just such an occasion) to the ends of the ropes and passed one back to Edward. One after the other, Edward following Sol’s lead, they flung the hooks out into the lake and strung the ropes along the regimented sticks, which had been notched at the tops and stuck firmly into the soft bank of the lake. 

They came to rest in the leaf-litter, just where the ground turned from damp to dry - Sol was reclining, balanced on his side and clutching the end of his rope in one loose hand, so Edward did the same. This earned him a slanting, squinting gaze and the beginning of an incredulous little smile from the man beside him. 

“Say, Edward?”

“Sol?”

“Do you know how to fish?”

“Oh!” Edward blinked. “Well— I have been fishing, a few times.”

“Hmm.”

“But I just— Well. I never really took to it, I suppose.”

Sol had his lips pressed together, his eyes twinkling. “You never took to it.”

Edward leveled a flat little glare at Sol, who looked completely unrepentant. “Please, if you have something mischievous to say about that, don’t hold back.”

“Oh, no!” Sol’s eyebrows went up in an expression of perfect innocence. “On the contrary. If I had only been so lucky in my youth as to be free to abandon hunting or fishing for lack of enthusiasm.”

“You abandoned a well-paying trade to join the Royal Marines,” Edward volleyed back, endowing the last two words with a sort of vocal flourish. “Got to travel the world in your lovely red uniform. How’s that for luck?”

Sol snorted and gestured expansively at their present surroundings. “I could just as well ask you the same, come to that.” He looked ready to say more, face taking on a vaguely melancholy tint, but something in the water caught his attention. He whipped his head around, hair dancing about to show the back of his neck, thick and downy and damp with sweat. “Hell. Alright, o’ ye who never took to fishing, watch me now.”

Edward sat forward onto his elbows, eyes trained on the poised line of Sol’s body. A moment of stillness, stretching out long and befuddling, then Sol shifted forward and tugged hard, brought up the line whip-fast and hand-over-hand. When the hook breached the surface, it was trailing a bloody glinting thing that thrashed and wriggled fruitlessly against its capture. Quick as anything, Sol snatched the fish from the notch in the first stick with one sure hand and gave it a hard smack in the head with the stick that had arrested its movement. 

Edward was transfixed by it, glittering like a jewel, trailing watery blood from its open mouth. He had cried trying to put a minnow on the hook, when he was young - there was a trick to doing it without killing them, but he couldn’t get the hang of it. He hadn’t wanted to look at the little things, so pitiful as they lay useless around him on the dock. Now he stared and stared. Perhaps it was only that he was hungry now and he’d been hungrier before, that he had grown into a man who could watch a thing die and still want to eat it, but it felt like he was witnessing something vital. 

“Mind your line,” Sol was saying. He put the fish down and made cuts to bleed it; Edward looked away from the bright copper font that began to sluggishly anoint the ground. “Did you see how it works well enough?”

“Er—” Edward twisted about and caught hold of his rope again. “How did you know to pull it up?”

“You’ll feel a tug,” Sol said, crouching behind him, “on the line.” He set his hands on Edward’s forearms to steady him. His palms were clammy with blood and fish, wet from what he’d done to feed them both; Edward leaned into the touch like it was something rare and covetous. “Get up and pull quick. Kill it quick too.”

“Right,” Edward nodded. “Don’t want it to suffer?”

Sol huffed a laugh; it tangled in the long hair at Edward’s neck and warmed his skin. “That, and the taste goes off otherwise.”

It took them two hours to catch as much fish as they’d caught meat in the last fortnight. At a guess, Edward would say it wasn’t far past noon when they wrapped their catch in an insulating layer of fabric (Edward’s coat, which he submitted for this task on the assumption that somewhere in Canada there would be soap flakes and hot water) and headed back to their camp with hearts lightened by the promise of fresh food. Edward felt each moment it took to build the fire and gut the fish keenly indeed, and tasted the pale metallic meat with riotous zeal; conversely, after their meal was over, several hours slipped away almost without his noticing. The fire burned warm and drowsy in their sunny little clearing, and he had a suspicion that he had been dozing for some time when he woke to the further, pleasantly suffocating warmth of Sol’s body pressed against his own. 

“Hullo,” he groaned. “What are you up to?”

“Mmm.” Sol pressed his scratchy-soft face into the fever of Edward’s neck. “Thought I’d try taking a nap, since you seem so fond of it.”

“And,” Edward mustered through the thick sensation of kisses up and down his neck, “how do you find it?”

Sol brought his head up so they were nose to nose, almost kissing. “I don’t think I’m taking to it.” His arms snaked down around Edward’s waist and hips without warning, and hefted him up onto the fallen tree against which he’d been reclining; Edward felt a familiar little swoop in his stomach to feel Sol’s hands gripping onto him that way, lifting him to set him where he would. 

Edward shifted his legs eagerly open for Sol to stand as close as could be, chest to chest belly to belly prick to prick, and kissed him breathless for a long and syrupy moment. Sol’s hands were on his back, on his arms, on his thighs, and Edward felt as malleable as clay in the summer sun. 

He had been promised a proper buggering; to that end he pushed his arse towards Sol and rubbed up against him, almost keeling backwards off the log in his hasty ardor. With a soft _whoa_ Sol steadied him, then dropped to the ground between his legs with all the discernment and forbearance of an anchor. He pressed his face to Edward’s belly, tugged his shirt up, kissed and licked and nipped; pressed his face to Edward’s groin, tugged his trousers down, heaved in a great breath like the smell of a man who’d been living unwashed in the wilds for three months was something divine. 

Edward groaned, cock twitching to attention in anticipation of what was to come, but Sol made no move to put mouth to prick. Instead he hefted Edward up by the underthighs so his arse was on full display in the afternoon sun, wedged his own trousers underneath him by way of a cushion, ran one rough thumb down the damp twitching crease of Edward’s fundament, and then— He buried his face between the two cheeks and pressed an open-mouthed, devouring kiss right over Edward’s hole. 

Edward jerked and gasped amid this fresh onslaught - whatever he had expected, it was not this, it was not Sol with his nose tucked up to Edward’s taint and his tongue pressing flat and wide and warm over Edward’s arsehole. He’d heard of this - thought of it - rather a lot, actually - but he never imagined he would come to practical knowledge of it in such a circumstance. His head swam - he couldn’t be terribly clean, after all, living as they both were. But Sol didn’t seem to mind - he was charting Edward’s passage wholesale, sucking at his rim, licking around it with spit-wet lips and tongue and insistent scrape of whiskers. He seemed insatiable, intent on breaking him down completely; no whine from Edward’s rough throat or restive twitch of his hips would prevail on him to do - more, less, Edward did not even know himself what it was he wanted, only that he _did_ want it, the way one wants food or air or fresh water. 

Finally, when Sol could press the point of his tongue to Edward’s hole and slip it inside, he parted his face from Edward’s arse with a wet sound and groped for the tin of grease. His two fingers went into Edward without any fuss at all - he whistled low and smug to see it, a sound equal parts arousing and embarrassing - and were soon joined by a third, stretching him out with the care that was necessary for such a cock as Sol Tozer possessed.

When Sol finally made his way inside - hot head slipping in the grease at Edward’s rim, thick length pressing in firm and burning and immediate, rubbing incidentally over the seat of Edward’s pleasure - it was an incandescent, delirious relief. Edward’s thighs squeezed around Sol’s hips, his legs twitched against Sol’s back; every part of him felt like it was crying out for Sol to come impossibly closer, to make himself a home of Edward’s body. Here in the dappled golden sun, in the rare wild air, he felt almost faint with pleasure - this day was theirs alone, theirs to have without the fear of judgment, and the knowledge pulsed out radiant around them both. 

Sol set a pace that had Edward jostling about on the fallen log; to steady him, Sol clutched Edward’s arse in his broad hands and held fast as he drove in with dedication. Edward felt so very _held_ by it, so encompassed; as if Sol were a protective god, fitting Edward like the world into the palm of his hand. He was pinned by Sol’s prick deep in him, fastened to him like a compass to North, seeking, _seeking._ Sol’s hands slipped sweaty on his arse, thumbs dug into the crease of his hip and thigh, as he rolled his hips forward in a magnetic frenzy and made pleasure burst light and fizzing from that spot inside of Edward. It had been so _long,_ he had been so long starving for it; now he was receiving it at last, and he could not ask for better.

His own cock stood up ruddy and forgotten against his stomach, leaking steadily as Sol had him with tender force. He reached a hand for it, just to grip it, just to take the hard metallic edge off of his pleasure, but Sol pinned his wrist - “Bear up, Ned,” he said against his lips, “I’ll finish you,” and how could Edward hold out against such a promise? He arched back into Sol, flesh to burning sweating flesh, and let himself be borne along in the wave of want. 

So submerged in sensation was he, so full of the blinding afternoon sunlight and the intimate heat of penetration, that when Sol got close he could _feel_ it - like a tug on the line, a ripple in the rigging, connected and attuned. And like a line snapping taut under pressure, almost without his leave, his own body clenched unreservedly around Sol’s in a frantic pulsing rhythm, _now now now._ Sol had his teeth in Edward’s shoulder and his hands on Edward’s flanks - thumbs on his nipples, pressing rough and perfect, fingers in his armpits, stroking through hair and skin and sweat - and his prick deep _deep_ in Edward’s arse when he came. A wave crashing, a flood pouring in; Sol’s bollocks twitching up tight against Edward’s cheek, Sol’s spend rushing into him like a stream through the forest.

Almost at once Sol was out of him and back down on his knees; Edward barely had time to get over the secondhand hum of Sol’s orgasm before his own cock was swallowed to the root. Sol got at him like he was a feast, his fingers skating through the mess he’d left to drip out of Edward’s hole - he made a magnificent picture down there on the ground, brow knit and lips stretched and nose pressed close into Edward’s underbelly, and Edward was so _close._ He felt Sol’s proud throat swallow around him once - twice - and then he too was spending, head dizzy and blood singing and eyes full of the golden spool of Sol’s sunlit hair. God, he thought, God, this was perfection. 

The next thing he knew he was keeling backwards off the log and into the damp leafy floor of the forest. 

Sol’s face appeared in his field of vision, a round shaggy (seed-spattered) shadow to shield him from the sun’s stabbing light. He looked half-startled, half-holding back a laugh. “D’you need a hand, Ned?”

“Lord.” Edward sat up on his elbows. He was about to respond in the affirmative when a bit of mischief occurred to him. He raised his eyebrows and blinked up at Sol gormlessly. “Bit soon, isn’t it? Give a man a moment.”

For a long moment, Sol stared. Then his face cracked open in a wide grin and he began to laugh, fizzing and loud like a lightning storm. He slapped Edward’s shoulder with the hand he had been extending, and Edward began to laugh too, savoring the curve of Sol’s cheek and the lines at his eyes as much as the sound they were sharing in. And he thought, lying flat-out and bare-arsed on the forest floor beneath the man who had just buggered him blind and laughing together like loons, that he had been wrong - if anything was perfection, it was this. 

•••

When they set out from the lake at last, Edward felt a change upon them both. They were not truly easy - he thought they might neither of them ever be easy again - but there was less of bated breath, less of uncertainty and grief about their discourse, more of the lightning-storm laughter and less of the suffocating quiet. As the days peaked and began ever-so-slowly to wane they made their way again southeast, again towards new lands and unknown fortunes. In the nights they paused, lax with exhaustion, and sought the unwinding animal affection of each other’s hands and mouths and pricks. They ate what they could kill and what was ripe to pick, drank what they could find of running streams, and heeded no map save for Edward’s dented compass and the new maps they were forming of each other.

Now it was (Edward thought) July, and they must be drawing close to Canada. Once or twice they had passed others on their path, trappers who fortunately took them for the same, solitary men on their way to resupply. Edward sensed their honeymoon privacy drawing to a close, and he grieved for it. But for now, tonight, they were alone. 

It was late, but the dawdling summer sunset had given way to a fat, bright moon that lit their clearing like an eerie mirror of the day. Nights were chilly here, even in the summer, and they were laid together in the usual way, with Sol on his back and Edward half on top of him. In fact, Edward had thought Sol to be asleep when the words rumbled up from the chest his head was pillowed on. 

“You ever do it the other way ‘round?”

Edward puzzled over that for a long moment before unsticking his tongue to answer. “Do what?”

A growl of a clearing of a throat. “Fucking, you know. Buggery. You ever, eh.”

“Yes.” Edward blinked up at the moonlit canvas. “I’m not particular. Well. Not about that part of it.”

Sol made a funny little noise - a laugh, but not the quiet chuckle Edward was used to, nor the rolling full-bodied guffaw he had become acquainted with more recently. It was a choked little thing, high and disbelieving. “Why do you ask?” Edward craned his neck to look up at Sol’s grimacing face. “Would you rather be receiving?”

Silence for a long time - Sol’s brow knit up, his eyes traced the seams of the tent. “I never thought about it too much,” Sol said at last. “Not before him. He was so—” His voice was thickening, now, one hand coming up to scrub through his whiskers. “He has this kind of— Hard sort of light about him, Ned. Always like he knew something we didn’t, and I— I wanted to be sure, I wanted.” He wouldn’t meet Edward’s eyes. “I wanted something to be sure about. That was how it was with him.”

Edward was wide awake now; he sat halfway up, gazing at Sol with what he hoped was an open, nonjudgmental face. “It wasn’t your fault, Sol. If it was, it was mine as much as yours. I felt the same way, it just— came out differently for me.” _In your direction, rather than in Hickey’s,_ he didn’t say.

“It was, though, weren’t it?” Sol met his eyes, that bull-stubborn look back on his face. “It weren’t as if— You weren’t half so far in as I was, you— Listen, Ned, I did what I did and I just have to get on with it, can’t go blaming someone else. He only took what was in me already and made it bolder. Crozier was unfit for command, his lieutenants were weak and foolish, and our survival meant more than what we had to do to keep it.” His voice was loud, his eyes ablaze. “That’s what I thought, Ned. With or without him. Can’t make excuses and ask for forgiveness.”

“I forgive you,” Edward said, feeling about as fierce as he ever had as he said it. “And as we’re wandering the wilds of Rupert’s Land two thousand miles from anyone else who could, I’m afraid that’ll have to do.”

Sol groaned and knocked his head forward to press his brow against Edward’s. Kissed him, once, like an apology. “It does, love.” Got an arm around his back, dragged him back down to their makeshift bed and murmured into the close night air. “It does.”

They slept, woke, walked on. Talked of nothing in particular - the trees, the rocks, the weather. Pitched their tent and ate and went to bed. 

Sol stayed sitting up, fiddling with the blankets, as Edward stripped down to his smalls in the little tent. He was watching him with careful, intent eyes, dark in the dim of muted moonlight. Edward waited for him to speak. 

“I still think about it sometimes.”

His tone called to mind a flighty animal, pacing ‘round the perimeter of a pen. Edward blinked slowly and looked up at him, a question in his face. When this did not draw any elaboration from his partner, he wet his lips and asked: “Think about what?”

Sol glared at him. “Being— Christ. Being _fucked,_ Edward.” He looked like it cost him something mighty to admit it, frustrated and ashamed. “I try not to, but I _do,_ and it drives me fucking loopy.”

“You don’t—” _You don’t have to stop yourself thinking about it,_ Edward wanted to say. _I forgive you for having loved him,_ he wanted to say. _It doesn’t have to be giving something up,_ he wanted to say. Instead he tried another tack: “Have you been thinking about it today?” 

A nod. 

“Would you like to tell me about it?”

A catch of breath; a tongue pressed to teeth. Another nod. “I don’t. With him I always thought it’d be rough. Wanted it to be. Weren’t looking for kindness. I always wanted it, from anyone, I think, I just didn’t let myself know I wanted it. And I don’t. I don’t know how you’d be. That’s what you’re after, isn’t it?”

Edward thought, _God, yes;_ thought, _I’m after knowing you, as much as you’ll let me._ Said, “Would you like me to show you?”

Sol made a sound - a damp and wretched thing like boards groaning. “Please.”

Edward shifted into Sol’s space, close and humid in the tightness of the tent, and caught his face in both hands. He traced Sol’s full lower lip, the lines that crinkled up at his eyes, the white-pink place where there once had been a wound upon his cheek. Then he dipped in, tenderly, to kiss him: a greeting, a soothing gesture, _Here I am._ Sol bloomed open under him as he had so often before, slackening his mouth for Edward and letting his eyes slide shut under the tide of lips and tongue. Edward did not think he would ever tire of this sort of kissing. 

He slipped one knee between Sol’s legs as they kissed to find him thickening in his smalls already. Sol kicked the garment down his legs as Edward kissed all down his body - a nip at his prickly neck, a bite over one peaked nipple, a shower of lipping kisses down the trail of his belly, then, then, a wide lick over the shaft of his prick where it sat blushing and firm against the damp crease of his thigh. Edward took it whole in his mouth a moment, savored its restless briny weight upon his tongue, then settled back to suck and kiss at it as he circled Sol’s hole with a greased finger. 

Sol gasped out a hurt-sounding groan as Edward rubbed firm and sure over the clutching furl of his entrance, but his legs fell open wider and his cock blurted out a drop of seed in Edward’s mouth. He kept up groaning as Edward pressed in, louder than Edward had ever heard him before. Edward paused, a few times, to make certain Sol was well; on each occasion Sol would nudge at him with a foot and take to begging, please, Ned, goddamn you, _please._ Edward never could refuse him. He kept on with one finger, then two, stroking and stretching at Sol to ease him open. When he judged Sol was accustomed to the initial sensation, he sought out the seat of his pleasure and rubbed up firmly over it. The resultant hitching howl required no explanation. 

He got three fingers deep into Sol dizzyingly quickly; the flesh around his hand had grown slack and pliant, intolerably tempting. With every twist in now, every brush over that spot, Sol was panting out little pleas - _Jesus, Ned, fuck, fuck me_ \- and once again, Edward was powerless to resist. Sol’s soft-furred thighs were tense and fever-hot in Edward’s hands as he lifted him into his lap; his hole twitched hairy and silky and soft around Edward’s tip as he lined himself up. His face, as Edward thrust in slow and stuttering, was alight from the inside with an intensity Edward had never seen. _Beautiful, beautiful._

Edward nudged his hips forward once-twice-again and was fully within him, sunk impossibly deep in the slick velvet heat of Sol. Invited in, into this body that had guarded itself so carefully, this heart that had struggled so to unfurl into vulnerability - the heart that he could feel now, beating wild in Sol’s soft hairy breast, crying out for more in frantic harmony with the exultations flying from his throat. The creatures of reticence and shame they had both been were gone, entirely, burned away by the heat of their bodies. 

Edward set a pace, pointed and deliberate, striking Sol’s prostate as often as he could. The noises Sol was making built into a wild sort of melody, filling the tent and making Edward’s blood fizz and burn like liquor. When he caught Sol’s lips in his the song did not stop, but flowed humming and groaning into his own mouth through Sol’s. It was too much, too much by half; it was bewitching him, sending him down to his end too soon. He gasped, pulled away; the shining string of spittle that connected their lips in the moments afterward made him shiver in half-disgusted ecstasy. “Hell,” he muttered, “fucking hell, Sol.”

“Oh,” Sol groaned in reply, pushing his arse up against where Edward had pulled out just to the head of himself. “Ned, would you please. Would you.”

“I’ll—” Edward gritted his teeth, steeled himself against the absent judder of his hips - seeking Sol’s heat, his soft welcoming warmth, the passionate home he was making of himself for all of Edward’s uncouth desire. “I’ll spend.”

Sol tensed and jerked around him, bit out a curse. “Fuck, Ned. Do it, do it.”

“Really,” he murmured, “Could I—”

Sol dug into his backside sharply with one heel and ground out a put-upon groan; and alright, alright. Edward took his hips in hand - soft and heaving with life despite all they’d been into - and drove in, wild, seizing on the spark of pleasure that rushed up through his cock from somewhere deep in Sol. Once more - again - skin slapping and stretching hot, lips caught in teeth, Sol’s bollocks twitching against his belly - Sol’s prick leaking between them - Sol’s voice moaning _Ned_ like they were the only two people left on Earth - gone, he was gone, he was pouring himself out into Sol’s sweet channel and christening them both anew.

Sol gave him up slowly - even half-softened, Edward couldn’t help a whine when he eased himself out. The slippery flood that followed him out was stopped frantically by his own fingers; Sol gave a thin sort of groan and clenched his hole, sucking the digits halfway-in and making Edward’s head spin like he was coming again. 

“Hell,” he said again, hardly aware what he was saying. “You’re so soft down here, now, Sol.” He sunk himself down and pulled Sol up ‘til his face was planted firm in Sol’s groin, just south of his purpling prick. “So open for me, love. So good.” His fingers made a sucking sound as they left; he replaced them with his tongue, kissing and licking, soothing the reddened flesh. It was hard to breathe, hard to think, in the humid nook of Sol’s thighs; it was heaven. 

“Love how you smell. How you taste. Love how you opened up for me.” Spit was dripping down his chin, mingled with oil and his own spend. Sol was grunting above him, one hand desperately tugging at his prick. Again he thrust his tongue into Sol’s hole, again he sucked and lipped at the loosened ring of muscle, and Sol curled his legs around his head - he felt protected by them, cradled, world reduced to sweaty furred flesh and the hot pulse of pleasure-blood beneath it. He groaned, reached up to meet Sol’s hand on his cock, pumped blindly as he worshipped with his mouth below— And Sol seized, long and hard, as he spurted thick over their joined hands with Edward’s name rough on his lips. Edward tipped his head up, dropped his mouth open, and drank.

When they had sat up groaning and griping and collected themselves enough to wipe each other’s messes (Sol was so very tender with the rag, spit-wetting it and squinting in the dim to draw the crust of seed from Edward’s face; Edward, to his abashment, found that most of what ought to be done to clean Sol’s fundament he had already accomplished with his own mouth), they lay back down together, still damp with sweat where they touched in the midsummer night. Sol tucked his head down to press a kiss to Edward’s crown when they were settled; he murmured a _thank you,_ barely audible in the sleepy air of the forest. Edward only kissed his neck by way of a response. 

“If you were a lady,” Sol said after some minutes more, “I’d ask you to marry me.”

Edward sighed. He couldn’t say he hadn’t thought of it, quite bitterly at times. But the truth of it was that he aimed to _be_ married to Sol, by every measure but the law. He aimed to make a life with him, aimed to stick by him and love him with dizzying, dangerous verity. They would come to Canada, and play at being cousins or stepbrothers or any other game two similarly-accented men could get away with to live together, but when Sol came home from fishing on their lake to find Edward in the doorway of their house bringing in the vegetables, when they set down their goods and took each other into their arms despite their dirty hands, they would be true and wed.

“Well,” Edward replied, quiet in the night, “I don’t know if I ought to accept an offer of marriage from just any lad I come across with a handsome face and a bloody great cockstand.” Sol delivered a hearty kick to Edward’s shin and a gusty snort into his face, and Edward smiled. “Oh, you’ve won me over. You can build me a house and I’ll promise not to leave you ‘til we die, and we can call it done.”

“Aye,” Sol sighed. Edward couldn’t see his face, but he could hear the smile in his voice. “That sounds lovely.”

**Author's Note:**

> Additional warnings:  
> \- a hint at passive suicidal ideation  
> \- animal death via hunting and fishing 
> 
> The song Sol hums, ["The Manchester Angel",](https://mainlynorfolk.info/june.tabor/songs/themanchesterangel.html) is 1) a Lancashire folk song, 2) about a soldier and his lover, and 3) apparently dates from the second Jacobite rising, which isn't technically relevant (and isn't at all apparent from the lyrics) but i just think it's a neat song for him to be singing, considering...everything.


End file.
